Hell or High Water
“Obvious problems, those are easy to take care of, it’s the hidden dangers that are going to kill you in the end.”  The Great Cartographer.

The Command Carrier CS-826, better known as the Hellfire, was slowly moving along through the great derelict fields of sector 278, mainly trying to find a working power core due to its own failing one.  The Hellfire was in a spot of trouble, the last battle with the enemy strike fleet from the Patrician Hierarchy had forced them to overdrive their main reactors, and since the nearest dockyard was over three light-years away, and their hyperspace subdrives were crippled, this was the only way to get any suitable repairs.  
This place was never a fun place to come, it was a sad sight for any starship captain, every ship had a personality, a life force, and so much death would make any understanding individual a bit teary eyed.  The captain of the Hellfire, Jenna Ariales who was an unusual lemur type, was one of the more odd captains of the PSDF.  She would fight like a banshee when she got pressured into it, but she was a very emotional person at the same time, and this place was just too much for her at the time.
Even though she tried to hide it, the command crew could see that her eyes were glazed over from such a horrible sight, ships torn in half, blown to pieces, gutted for their remains to be sold as scrap to the highest bidder, to her it was just as bad as ripping someone’s heart out and selling it to a chop-shop.  
The oddity of this derelict field was that it wasn’t owned by anyone, it was a free place to come and get what was needed, though it had its own dangers hidden in the deeper parts.  Sure, raiders and pirates were bad enough, but some ships here were not as dead as one might assume.  It always seemed as if something was moving around the ship, sneaking around like a monstrous black cat, waiting for the right moment to pounce.
Jenna rested her head on her hands, just staring out the large windows of the command bridge.  The navigation officers were buzzing around, trying to scan for the right energy signature to signal a possible replacement.  Every now and then the crew would tense up as lights on the crippled ships would flicker, and some of them would slowly drift into each other and cause more damage to them.  It was a restless night, but it had to be done.  
It wasn’t particularly easy navigating such a large ship through such a densely filled wreckage field to begin with.  The Hellfire was in excess of 5,000 feet long, and it was like a massive rectangle with articulate extensions all over the hull.  The command bridge was large as well, mainly because this ship was like a control tower for all the rest of the fleet, though at this point the rest of the fleet had been ordered to go home.  There were two launch bays in the bow, each one with it’s own energy shield to keep space from coming in and making a home for itself.  The hull was mostly black, except for detail lines and markings which were in red.  But at this point the hull was scratched and dented, and a few penetrations had been made by the big guns of other ships.  But the Hellfire could throw it right back with its six heavy particle cannons and its multiple rocket ports, and of course its assortment of fighters and bombers.
As it was said, it was a little difficult, and this was made even more evident at the point where a large piece of a ships engines in the derelict field grinded along the side, making a nice long gouge and shaking everything about.  To make things a bit easier the normal lighting switched to a blue tint, and all the rest of the lights on the ship came online to show what was getting close to them.  Just at this point, one of the navigational officers spoke up:
“Sir, I think I might have found something, it’s in an old vacation ship but it has a reactor that has an output close to our own, should we go see about it?”
Jenna wasn’t too happy about ripping it out of any ship, but she nodded silently, knowing they needed it regardless of her own emotional distress over it.  The Hellfire slowly moved up alongside the massive vacation ship, which appeared to have been crafted to look like the old cruise liners of the oceans for a bit of nostalgia factor.  A good sized docking clamp locked the two ships together, and the scouting crew got ready to go.  
Jenna was a little tense about this, it seemed too easy, and it seemed too convenient, but she finally gave the go ahead and they set off.  Four scouts in their environmental suits exited through the docking port, first coming to what looked like the main event hall of the vacation ship.  It was a large elegant room, lined with gold leafed pillars and chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.  At one point this would have been a beautiful sight, but now it was disturbingly wrecked and mangled, few tables even being in one piece, and a large hole in the dance floor where the grand piano had once been.
Not wanting to spend too much time sightseeing, the scouts moved along towards the back of the ship where the engineering room would most likely be, leaving a trail behind so they could know how to get back out.  Upon getting there the scouts stuck a signal beacon to the power core and tried to radio back, but all the signals went silent abruptly.
The comms officer tried to get a connection with them but he couldn’t get anything and they looked at the captain worriedly.  Looking right back at them, she huffed and shook her head mumbling, “April fools huh…?”  and with that she looked over at the security officer and nodded to him, giving him just the signal he had been waiting for.  Ordering a group of marines to accompany the salvage team, the ten people moved along like a convoy, keeping the tank treaded gantry crane in the middle to guard it.  Slowly they moved through the bowels of the vacation ship, and upon coming to the engineering bay the salvage team was terrified.  All four scouts had been torn apart when the structural support had failed and they were assaulted with a mix of coolant, acid, and flying shrapnel.  
The marines didn’t seem phased at all, they had seen a lot of death in their time and this wasn’t anything new to them.  The group leader picked one of the salvage operators up by his collar and plopped him down in front of the power core and said a simple, “Lets get it and go shall we?”  The salvage team nodded quickly, bringing the gantry into position and carefully picking the power core up out of the ruptured reactor, bringing it back in and giving the marines a signal that they were done.  Just then the engineering bay let out a high pitched squealing sound as some more structure beams began failing, and the marines rushed the salvage team and their precious cargo out the bulkhead entry.  
Something odd was happening outside the Hellfire as well now, the navigational officers freaking out as something massive was coming towards them.  A large battleship, with a hole bored right through it’s side and large chunks of its body missing, was slowly bearing down on them, attempting to ram them.  The marines and the salvage team rushed back to the ship, breaking the docking port as soon as they were back on board.  In just the right amount of time, the Hellfire lumbered out of the way as the crippled battleship with it’s one working engine plowed into the vacation ship, collapsing and falling apart as they both fused together.  
Jenna looked worriedly at the navigational officers and said, “Now seems like it would be a pretty good time to leave doesn’t it? I don’t feel like getting rammed today and I doubt you do either.”
With that they scrambled, bringing the main engines up to full power and starting to move through the maze of wreckage.  As they were moving along, four high output energy beams fired off of a clump of derelicts that were stuck together, making a few scars on the bottom of the Hellfire as it tried to escape.  At the same time another large ship, most likely another carrier, fell from a clump of derelicts right in front of the Hellfire, trying to get in the way so they would collide, but it crashed into another clump of derelicts before the Hellfire got there.
Jenna called down to the engineering bay telling them to divert power to the six main guns, getting ready for having to blow anything out of their way that needed to be.  Just then a large mass of wreckage floated by, pummeling the port side of the Hellfire with actual cannon shells instead of energy beams, punching holes through the armor and forcing them to put the port side launch bay into lockdown so no one would get sucked into space.
The lights on the Hellfire started to flicker as the old power core, which was already almost dead before all this, started to break down.  If they didn’t replace it soon with the new one a catastrophic failure of containment was a given.  The engines powered the battered command carrier along, smoke billow out of the new holes in its side, sparks flitting out as well as subsystems started to fail and the backups came online.  
As they shut down the main reactor they started up the generators to keep the engines going, but they were only half as effective with that little power.  The techs started to process of extracting the core and replacing it but it would take at least fifteen minutes to complete.  And that wasn’t good at all as a very old destroyer, with it’s bow missing, started to come up behind the now slowly moving Hellfire, burying its mangled front end into one of the three engines, causing it to blow out from such an impact.  The destroyer backed off, falling into another pile of wreckage as now the crippled third engine let out a trail of black smoke and fire, the tech had twice the problems now due to the fire, if it persisted the engines would structurally fail and the hyperspace systems would refuse to start up.
Looking like something that had just came out of a grinder, the Hellfire finally emerged from the derelict field, at that moment taking a direct hit to the back of the command bridge, sending sparks all over the place and alerting the medical staff to rush to their attention.  A crackled message came from the engineering bay, alerting them that the main reactors were about to come back online and they had the fire under control.
Shuddering a little, Jenna narrowed her eyes and said, “I don’t care if we are missing half the ship, we aren’t doing this again…that was just stupid.”  The medical staff cleared the officers, just patching up a few cuts and scraped before going down to the other decks to offer assistance.  
Jenna gave the navigation officers a look of “Get us the hell out of here” and they nodded, understanding and charging up the hyperspace gate systems before taking them through into the hyperspace conduit system, and getting on the way home.  What a day huh?